State of the Art
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus of supporting a patient's arms in a position suitable for medical imaging when the patient is supine, or lying flat on his or her back. More specifically, the present invention provides a support which can easily be attached to a standard medical table pad, and which supports the patient's forearms.
Field of Art
During some medical imaging procedures, such as computerized axial tomography (CAT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or certain X-ray procedures, patients lay flat on a padded table. A patient may be instructed to keep his arms flat at his sides during the procedure in an ‘arms-down’ position; however, there are multiple drawbacks to this position. Keeping the patient's arms at his sides increases the radiation dose absorbed during certain scans by as much as twenty percent. Arms in the arms-down position can cause scanning artifacts, which can conceal dangerous hemorrhages. Additionally, the overall image quality—especially of organs in the abdominal area—may be significantly degraded by an arms-down position.
In order to address this problem, patients may be asked to keep their arms stretched flat above their heads during torso scans. Because a CAT scan or MRI can take between 10 minutes and two hours, this position must sometimes be held for a long period, without moving. Many patients have difficulty holding this ‘arms-up’ position for a long period of time, particularly injured and/or elderly patients. Individuals with rotator-cuff injuries to the shoulder may be physically unable to move their arms upward sufficiently.
Further, when arms are overhead for a length of time, patients may naturally allow their elbows to move outward, away from the center of the mat, pad, or table. This movement may physically interfere with the scanning equipment or medical personnel, and additionally rotates the patient's shoulder out and back. This external-rotation movement may not only degrade the image quality of the scan, but also results in strain to the shoulder joint.
Patients prone to shoulder injury, particularly the elderly or those already injured, are often unable to hold the correct position for an extended length of time. Such patients may be asked to fold their arms over their upper abdomens instead. However, this position still interferes with image quality, and generally does not reduce radiation dose when the whole torso is being scanned.
Heretofore, several types of arm support devices have been used. In general, these devices are bulky, difficult to attach to the medical imaging table, and may interfere with access to the patient's head when, for example, breathing tubes or IV lines must be supplied. Moreover, these devices do not prevent external rotation of the shoulder cuff, and thus, a patient's elbows may slip outward during the course of the scan and cause strain to the patient's shoulders. Finally, arm supports suitable for use with medical scanners are not well-adapted for patients having varying shoulder widths. Medical scanning arm support devices are often large, expensive to construct, difficult to clean, and do not adequately solve the problem of external shoulder rotation.